geographical record ïµï¸ï³
The Geographical Review ï±ï°ï° (ï´): ïµï¸ï³-ïµï¹ï·, October ï²ï°ï±ï° Copyright © ï²ï°ï±ï° by the American Geographical Society of New York
� Dr. Culcasi is an assistant professor of geography at West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia ï²ï¶ïµï°ï¶.
GEOGRAPHICAL RECORD
CONSTRUCTING AND NATURALIZING THE MIDDLE EAST
KAREN CULCASI
I have been writing about it in the Guardian for almost four years and I'm fairly sure that I have been there, but I have to confess that I don't know for certain where the Middle East is.
ïBrian Whitaker, ï²ï°ï°ï´
Deï¬ning or locating the "Middle East" is a precarious endeavor.1 The territory and the characteristics that have been used to delimit and describe this world re- gion have varied immensely over time and space. Even a cursory examination of maps or encyclopedias quickly reveals that the Middle East and the various criteria that have been used to deï¬ne it are variable and ambiguous. Nevertheless, the re- gion has been naturalized as a real and deï¬nable place. Indeed, popular and politi- cal discourses on the Middle East are so commonplace that we rarely scrutinize their socially constructed origins and connotations.
Critical examinations of naturalized geographical concepts such as "space," "scale," and "place-speciï¬c identities" have sparked vibrant discussions (Häkli ï±ï¹ï¹ï¸; van Schendel ï²ï°ï°ï², ï¶ïµï¹), but the world region has received scant attention. Gener- ally deï¬ned as groupings of contiguous states that have some cultural, historical, economic, and even physiographic similarity, world regions are a taken-for-granted concept (N. Smith ï±ï¹ï¹ï², ï¶ï´-ï·ï¸; Lewis and Wigen ï±ï¹ï¹ï·, ï±ï³; Harvey ï²ï°ï°ï±, ï²ï²ï´). How- ever, world regions are not naturally existing, homogeneous spaces; rather, they are social constructs that are formed and altered in a myriad of discourses (Murphy ï±ï¹ï¹ï·, ï²ïµï¶; Paasi ï²ï°ï°ï±, ï±ï³, ï±ï¶; Hagen ï²ï°ï°ï³). In this essay I analyze the construction and naturalization...